Category: CMUTR
Institution: Department of Computer Science, Carnegie
        Mellon University
Abstract: As VLSI technology improves, the number of devices that can be 
        built on a chip, and the speed of those devices continue to 
        increase.
        These improvements allow much more complicated systems to be 
        considered than were possible a short time ago.
        Along with these improvements, however, come many challenges 
        directly associated with the speed and scale of the new 
        circuits.
        This thesis presents a method for taming the complexity of large
        and fast VLSI systems.
        
        As chips get larger, and delays in signal propagation even 
        inside a single chip become more significant, systems that are 
        designed around a global synchronizing signal such as a clock 
        become more difficult to design.
        One alternative is to design the system hierarchically as a set
        of subsystems each operating at its own rate and cooperating 
        through communication.
        These subsystems can be built using asynchronous or self-timed 
        circuit techniques which allow the circuits to run at their own-
        speed without synchronizing to a global clock signal.
        The act of communicating synchronizes the processes involved in
        the communication and allows data to be shared between 
        processes.
        
        Another problem of large system is related to the very 
        complexity of the system.
        One method for taming this complexity is to use automatic 
        methods for generating circuits from behavioral descriptions.
        Such a system is usually called  a silicon compiler.
        This allows the designer to abstract away details of the low-
        level circuits faithfully mimic the behavior in terms of high 
        level programs.
        Because the generated circuits faithfully mimic the behavior 
        of the program, the resulting circuits are correct by 
        construction.
        In order to design efficient systems in this way there must be a
        way for the programmer to reason about the resulting circuit 
        based on the program text.
        The translation process must be sufficiently transparent to 
        give the programmer some idea of how different program 
        alternatives will affect the compiled circuit.
        
        Combining these ideas, I present a method for designing a VLSI
        system as a concurrent program written in a subset of OCCAM and
        automatically translating that system description into an 
        asynchronous circuit.
        The translation procedure is syntax-directed, and the resulting
        circuits are improved using correctness-preserving circuit-to 
        circuit transformations.
        A compiler has been constructed that automatically performs the
        translation and transformation.
Number: CMU-CS-91-198
Bibtype: TechReport
Month: sep
Author: Erik Brunvand
Title: Translating Concurrent Communicating Programs into
        Asynchronous Circuits
Year: 1991
Address: Pittsburgh, PA
Super: @CMUTR